John Locke and natural right to property - Essay Example

As a means of explicating and elaborating on Locke’s particular view of private property and the means by which it is acquired as well as the rights that it necessarily portends, this brief analysis will review Locke’s arguments and attempt to juxtapose and coalesce them within the framework of how private property within the modern era is understood. Furthermore, the qualifications to what constitutes private property and how it can and should be utilized will also be discussed. Lastly, a level of inference will be drawn based upon the means by which Locke has defined private property and the means by which such a definition is still useful within the current modern context of evolved societies.

Firstly and most importantly, it should be stated that according to John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, he believed private property to be a natural right. This natural right is related to the reader due to the fact that Locke believes that the private ownership of property and the wealth generation that it can bring is one of the only means by which an individual can sustain himself/herself in a relative form of physical comfort. Whereas many people throughout the decades have criticized such an interpretation as going against the natural order of things, the fact of the matter is without private property, the ability of the individual to profit from the otherwise communal land is all but negligible.

Locke does place a limit on the so called “Naturalness” of private property. Ultimately, his qualification of what can be determined as the natural right is contingent upon the lack of greed that private property ownership must exhibit. In other words, for Locke, private property is a natural right and moral good as long as it is not engaged upon with greed. Locke goes on to differentiate what is specifically meant by the somewhat nebulous